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A team of German, Israeli and Palestinian researchers is studying ancient bones found in the biblical city of Jericho for clues that could help scientists combat tuberculosis.

"We see a re-emerging wave of tuberculosis all over the world and ... perhaps learning from the past will help us understand the present," says Professor Andreas Nerlich from Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich.

Nerlich and other researchers in the team have begun studying 6000-year-old bones unearthed in Jericho more than a half-century ago by British anthropologist Dr Kathleen Kenyon, in what is now the occupied West Bank.

Chance find

"They told me they had lots of boxes of bones and didn't know what they were because they'd been deposited there fifty years earlier by an anthropologist who'd worked with Dr Kathleen Kenyon who'd been excavating at Jericho," Spigelman says.

"When I examined them, I recognised that these were the bones from Jericho, and I told them not throw them out."

Disease of crowds

Tuberculosis, also known as TB, is a deadly infectious bacterial disease that usually attacks the lungs. Acknowledged as a disease of crowds, it is transmitted from human to human living in close contact.

Many of the bones show signs of tuberculosis, suggesting the disease afflicted a significant proportion of the population of the ancient world.

Experts believe the infectious bacterial disease, which usually attacks the lungs, could have originated about 10,000 years ago in the first villages and small towns in an area stretching from the Persian Gulf through to the Nile delta.

Researchers say preliminary work suggests there is sufficient DNA in the bone samples to provide clues to how tuberculosis evolves and help experts find new ways to fight it.

Spigelman says knowing how a disease evolves helps us understand what it will do as it continues to evolve, and will ultimately alter the practice of public health officials in combating it.

Professor Ziad Abdeen, a Palestinian who heads the nutrition and health research institute at al-Quds University near Jerusalem, says the project shows how Israeli and Palestinian academics had learned to cooperate.